I listen to all Baltimore news outlets because I want to hear what they have to say and how they say it. One thing that is being driven home on all news outlets are that Baltimore's School Board is run by a CEO, not an Administrator. Now, the Mayor and Governor are public servants....administrators, Public Commissions, Public Justice, and Public Transportation are all headed by public servants.....administrators. So why has Johns Hopkins and the 1% of Baltimore decided that local news will refer to our school superintendent as a CEO?

WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT......THESE PUBLIC SCHOOLS WILL BE PRIVATIZED AND WILL BE EXTENSIONS OF BUSINESS!!! THAT IS WHAT YOUR THIRD WAY CORPORATE NEO-LIBERAL IS TELLING YOU!

Remember folks, the Mayor controls these policies and it is Rawlings-Blake handing our schools to O'Malley that allows these school board decisions. We simply need to RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE .......STOP VOTING FOR THE CORPORATE FARM TEAM FOR THESE POSITIONS!

As I said earlier Baltimore is following New York City with its education reform and Baltimore's reform is in fact funded by Bloomberg et al through private donations to hand-picked schools.We also know New York has been at this for a decade and unlike Baltimore they have a strong community activism and networking and lots of real academic study which Baltimore and Maryland has almost none. Most studies here come from the very institutions pushing to privatize public education so we know the results are biased for success with Race to the Top reform.

I ENCOURAGE ALL CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE AND MARYLAND TO READ WHAT IS HAPPENING IN LARGE URBAN CITIES LIKE NEW YORK AND CHICAGO AS REGARDS PARENTS, TEACHERS, COMMUNITIES, AND FIGHTS AGAINST EDUCATION REFORMEdWize......PURE (Parents United for Responsible Education)......Parents Across America.....all have strong unions and real statistical analysis that shows that all this money going into reform as regards education businesses and consultants.....all the choice and charters are doing nothing for gains in achievement. What they are doing as we see below is simply segregating schools according to achievement and then using the achievement of those most successful schools to show what is a margin of error gain. They are deliberately stacking the data to justify what is privatizing public education into cheapened, student tracked vocational schools. Teachers are being so abused as to push ever lower the quality of those willing to work with such a lowered degree of professionalism, wages, and resources. THIS IS HOW THEY KILL PUBLIC EDUCATION!

10 percent of the schools produce nearly half the college-ready graduates Last week the city announced that 22.2% of students from the high school Class of 2012 met the state’s college-ready standard, up from 21.1% for the Class of 2011. What the announcement didn’t say was that this already weak college-readiness rate was inflated by a small group of schools that contribute a disproportionate number of students to the city’s college-ready percentage. The differences between schools were so great that the city’s overall college-readiness rate of 22.2% did not represent the reality for even most city schools. In fact, only a quarter of the city’s high schools had a college-ready rate that was 22% or better. Here’s one way to look at the numbers: Out of 352 total schools for which data are available, the top 35 schools — 10% of the total – graduated nearly half of the city’s 16,600 total of college-ready students, boosting the city’s overall college-ready figure and obscuring the lower rates achieved by the overwhelming majority of remaining schools. As the chart below shows, at these schools 73% of the graduating cohort is college-ready compared to only 16% for the bottom schools. The 35 schools that skewed results include the likes of Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Tech and Townsend Harris as well as a few neighborhood schools like Francis Lewis High School and Midwood High School. The distortion shows up most dramatically when you split the schools in half. The top 50% of schools contributed almost all the students — 15,600 students — to the city’s college-ready total of 16,668. The 170 schools in the bottom half of the rankings, though they have an estimated 22,500 students in their senior cohort, contributed a total of only 1,035 pupils to the total college-ready ranks. The average college-ready rate for this group was less than 5%. The huge differences in college readiness by school means that the standard mechanism for calculating the city’s rate doesn’t tell us much about the reality of New York City high schools. Many of the top schools have a very stable college-ready rate and have been in the top 10% of schools for the past three years. When the DOE reports on the city’s college-ready rate, it should take these things into consideration and report in the most transparent way. For 2012, this could have been accomplished if the DOE had said the following:

While the city’s overall college-ready rate is 22.2%, only 25% of the city’s high schools achieved this rate.

The city’s college-ready rate of 22.2% drops to 16% if the top 10 percent of schools for college-ready students (approximately 35 schools) are excluded from the calculation.

If you analyze the results by dividing the 352 schools in half by college-readiness rates, the difference becomes even more marked. The overwhelming number of college-ready students come from the top 50% of schools in the college-readiness rankings. The schools in the bottom half of the rankings manage to produce only about 1,000 college-ready students – less than 5% of the system’s college-ready total.

Notes: The college-readiness rate was created by the NYS Education Department to identify high school students who have graduated and who are academically ready for college-level math and English courses. To be deemed college ready, a student must pass the NYS Math and English Regents with an 80 and 75 or better, respectively. This benchmark was set based on the experience that the City University of New York (CUNY) had with students who attended NYC public high schools. Students who fail to meet the standard are required to enroll in remedial math and English courses or pass special exams that allow them to test out of remedial courses There were 406 high schools with students in the 2012 graduating class. Data for 54 of these schools, however, was not published. The DOE withheld the information on these schools in order to comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. - See more at: http://www.edwize.org/#sthash.NUDR5Nal.dpuf

______________________________________________ You see below that New York and now Chicago is handing education data over to Bill Gates. Remember, Bill Gates is the one behind this education privatization and they will make billions selling yet another round of personal data for corporate profits. All of this online education and software are all creating a huge education business bubble with Microsoft at the forefront. This is preparing for and aiding in building global education markets.......period!

I want Maryland to be aware that Baltimore and eventually the entire state will follow in New York's lead in this.....we just haven't started collecting the data yet!

Illinois still in student data mining program Yesterday the Tribune printed a Reuters story about the InBloom (formerly Wireless Generation) program funded by Bill Gates that is currently collecting student confidential records it plans to share with private software companies. InBloom says it cannot guarantee the safety of this data. The story reported that several states or districts which InBloom claimed were part of “Phase 1″ of their project have either disavowed any involvement or pulled out. The only remaining inBloom clients at this point are Illinois, Colorado and New York. Currently only Bloomington and Normal school districts are involved in our state, but Illinois plans to add Chicago and 34 other districts in 2014. I’ve written about this before, and tip my hat to the tireless work of my PAA colleague Leonie Haimson to expose this enormous threat to family privacy. I’ll share more on this tomorrow for Public Schools Action Tuesday, but meanwhile, here’s the letter I just sent to the Tribune: Thank you for publishing the excellent Stephanie Simon piece about states choosing not to share confidential student and teacher data with the Gates-funded corporation called inBloom Inc. Most parents are unaware of this threatened encroachment on family privacy which is already underway in the Bloomington and Normal school district and is slated to start in the Chicago Public Schools and 34 other districts in January 2014. The confidential data being collected by InBloom includes children’s personally identifiable information such as name, address, grades, test scores, detailed disciplinary and health records, race, ethnicity, economic status, disabilities and other highly sensitive information. It is being collected into an electronic “data store” with an operating system built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch which has been found to have illegally violated privacy in Great Britain and in the US. The “data store” will be placed on a vulnerable data cloud managed by Amazon.com. InBloom Inc. has already stated that it “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored…or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.” InBloom Inc. intends to make all this highly confidential data available to commercial vendors to help them develop and market their “learning products.” All of this is happening without parental knowledge or consent, and is encouraged by federal privacy rule changes made last year by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. As Simon's report points out, several states have reconsidered their earlier agreements to join this questionable program.

Illinois should do the same. Julie WoestehoffExecutive DirectorParents United for Responsible Education Chicago, IL - See more at: http://pureparents.org/?p=20724#sthash.yA7MuREy.dpuf

_________________________________________________This is a good analysis of education reform thus far. Please google this as it does not allow copying. This speaks to how education reform has been implemented with NO CITIZEN INPUT. It is bizarre to have education policy implemented for something as critical as education with no public input. You know if that is happening, it is not in the public interest! It speaks to allowing schools threatened with closure to instead be allowed to decide what they need in order to make these schools successful. Take a look at how things could be done better!

How Recent Education Reforms Undermine Local School Governance and Democratic Education

Democratic policymaking and democratic education have been undermined by the passage of No Child Left Behind. This brief offers guidelines for future federal education policy that addresses the loss of local control brought on by recent reforms. A video of Howe and Meens discussing the policy brief is available here: http://nepc.colorado.edu/author/howe-kenneth-r. Policy Brief DOWNLOAD/PRINT

______________________________________________If you do not believe that lowering the standards of teaching as a profession will ultimately undermine the quality of education your children receive you are not thinking through what democratic education means. We need teachers to be unafraid to talk and teach in the classroom. Every community has its own personal challenges and strengths and each community school should be allowed to approach education with those goals in mind. We need to be sure that if we allow education to become only about what will provide job-skills as is happening now, we will lose the skills necessary for building strong community and civic ethics. It is as important to be a good citizen as it is to be a good worker!

Teachers have always been the ones to place value on this side of learning. Common Core is not bad in that some standardization is needed. What we are seeing is far beyond this .......AND IT IS CAPTURING EVERY ASPECT OF WHAT GOES ON IN THE CLASSROOM.....THIS IS NOT GOOD!

This brief discusses how three recent popular educational reform policies move teaching towards or away from professionalization. These reforms are (1) policies that evaluate teachers based on students’ annual standardized test score gains, and specifically, those based on value-added assessment; (2) fast-track teacher preparation and licensure; and (3) scripted, narrowed curricula. These particular policy reforms are considered because of their contemporary prominence and the fact that they directly influence the way teaching is perceived. This analysis demonstrates that these three reforms, on the whole, lower the professional status of teaching. The pattern is nuanced, however. For instance, value-added teacher evaluation policies could be viewed as increasing professional status by their heavy emphasis on the role teachers can play on student achievement. To the contrary, value-added policies can be considered de-professionalizing: pressuring teachers to mechanically teach to tests while systematically devaluing the broader yet essential elements of teaching. Alternative, fast-track teacher preparation programs, such as Teach For America, purport to recruit from academic elites, which can be seen as a step towards professionalization. At the same time, fast-track teacher preparation and licensure programs de-professionalize teaching by the lack of focus on pedagogical training, the small amount of time dedicated to preparing teachers to teach, the assignment of inexperienced personnel to the most challenging schools, and the itinerate nature of these teachers. Scripted and narrowed curriculum could be said to move teaching closer to professional status by defining what should and will be covered. To the contrary, scripted and narrowed curriculum moves teaching away from professionalization by not allowing teachers to rely on their professional judgment to make curricula decisions for student learning, with the consequent sacrifice of higher-level learning, creativity, flexibility, and breadth of learning._____________________________________________Maryland has the same problems at the University of Maryland College Park as O'Malley and the general assembly work hard to corporatize and globalize this campus. Much of Maryland's education funding has gone into its effort to do this with satellite campuses as well. We hear discontent from faculty, students, and citizens but we need more people shouting loudly against this corporatization that is causing tuition to rise and access to fall.

'The leadership of other branches of the university, including all the university's deans, current and former officers of the alumni association, and the School of Medicine's Faculty Senate, issued statements in support of Sexton before and after Friday's vote tally'.

The statement above shows just who are the appointed school administrators put in place to privatize these universities so they will protect and support the global marketing of public universities and business partnerships that simply make these universities into corporate profit machines. Note that all School of Medicine just as with Johns Hopkins in Baltimore as cheerleaders for this privatization because they intend to become CEOs and profiteers from being apart of global health systems.

ONLY THE APPOINTED UNIVERSITY AND DEPARTMENT HEADS WANT THIS REFORM....THE MAINSTREAM UNIVERSITY STAFF UNDERSTAND WHERE THIS IS GOING. THEY NEED THE CITIZENS OF EACH STATE SHOUTING AGAINST THIS PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES.....THEY CANNOT DO IT ALONE.IT MATTERS WHO YOU RUN AND VOTE FOR IN PRIMARIES.....NEO-LIBERALS SUPPORT THIS GLOBALIZATION AND PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES WHILE A LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATE WOULD NOT!

New York University’s directory lists only one man named John Sexton, but after talking with people at the institution, it would be easy to come away with the impression that there are two very different men in the president's office.

There is one John Sexton who is viewed by supporters, including the institution’s governing board, faculty members in some of the professional schools, and some students and alumni, as a gregarious, thoughtful man who has overseen a radical improvement in the institution’s stature and ambition. He’s a man who greets strangers with hugs and regularly matches wits with comedian Stephen Colbert.

The other John Sexton, the one seen by some faculty members, is an autocratic ruler who has corporatized the university, marginalized faculty members in institutional governance, and pushed ahead with a controversial global and local development plans without the advice and consent of faculty.

This group of critics voiced its concern last week when the faculty of College of Arts and Sciences – the largest of the university’s largest 18 colleges and schools and often called “the heart of the university” – passed a vote of no confidence in the president, arguably the most high-profile vote of no confidence since Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences cast one against former President Lawrence Summers in 2005, which many say ultimately led to his resignation.

Of the 682 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members in NYU's College of Arts and Sciences eligible to vote, 569 participated in last week’s vote, according to a release by the Faculty Senators Council Caucus. Of those who voted, 52 percent agreed with the statement “The Faculty of Arts and Science has no confidence in John Sexton’s leadership.” Thirty-nine percent of voters disagreed, and 8 percent voted but abstained from expressing agreement or disagreement.

The catalyst for last week’s vote was a controversial planned expansion in Greenwich Village that the city approved late last year, but the broader charge that faculty members raise against Sexton is that in making decisions about the university’s strategic direction, Sexton has marginalized faculty members. They say he rarely engages faculty in substantive conversation and often ignores dissenting voices.

“I really see it [the vote] as a first step in an effort to try to turn NYU into a more open university which takes transparency seriously,” said Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis, and the president of NYU’s American Association of University Professors chapter. “We don’t have any transparency right now. It’s not just about the personality of the president. It’s about the structure of the institution as a whole.”

In the near term, the vote will likely be the talk of the university and the national higher education establishment. But the long-term ramifications of the vote for Sexton, the university’s direction and the faculty remain to be seen. Sexton’s contract runs through 2016, and after the results of the vote were revealed Friday, the university’s governing board put out a statement saying that its members unanimously support Sexton and the strategic direction in which he is taking the university.

“The vote – although supported by fewer than half the tenured faculty in FAS – is a disappointing outcome, in part because it does not seem to take account of NYU’s progress over the last decade, in part because it does not take heed of the major challenges U.S. higher education faces now, and in part because FAS has been the beneficiary of significant investment during John’s time, which led to manifest improvements for that school in terms of the recruitment of new faculty, the establishment of new areas of inquiry, and the creation of new facilities,” said board chair Martin Lipton in the statement.

The competing views of Sexton in the wake of the vote reflect a growing distance between faculty members, administrators and trustees in the modern research university as such institutions become increasingly complex. In recent years, faculty members at the University of Virginia, the University of Texas at Austin, Duke University and Emory University have all alleged that they have been cut out of important decisions about the strategic direction of their universities (sometimes blaming administrators and at other times blaming trustees and backing administrators). And this distrust between key stakeholder groups -- trustees, administrators and faculty members -- is making it difficult for universities to address questions that higher education observers say need to be addressed.

“When you look around the country at a variety of kerfuffles in recent years … it does suggest that we need to think harder about how consensus-building can be translated into today’s environment,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, whose board formerly was chaired by Sexton.

While many NYU faculty members simply want Sexton out, a large number want him to change his approach to faculty involvement in governance. If Sexton stays on – and given the board’s expression of support and Sexton’s own statements, that seems likely – he will likely have to find a way to rebuild support among the dissatisfied faculty members and find new ways of generating institutional consensus.

“Now we are in a time of tremendous pressure on higher education, and my goal is to sustain that academic momentum while adapting NYU to a dramatically changing environment,” Sexton said in a statement released in the wake of the vote. “Over the past several months, there has been vigorous debate about NYU’s direction, resulting in both expressions of support – from the Medical School, from the Nursing School, from the Dental School, from the Deans of all the schools, as well today’s email to the NYU community from the Trustees – and now this expression of dissatisfaction from FAS. In the university setting, we believe in debate and criticism; it helps us improve. That will be particularly important in the months and years ahead, because we are at a moment that compels meaningful change in higher education.”

Too Ambitious?

Much of the criticism of Sexton rests on his plans for NYU in the city. Administrators at the university, which has one of the lowest ratios in the country of classroom space to students, have been working since 2002 to expand the institution’s physical footprint in New York City.

The final plan, which was submitted to the city in early 2012, would develop 1.9 million square feet on two blocks in Greenwich Village, an area where a large chunk of the university’s faculty members live.

While some faculty members are opposed to the expansion outright, others are mostly unhappy with the way they say the university went about developing the plan. Faculty members say they were largely cut out of the planning process until it was too late to make changes.

This is an assertion that administrators disputes. They point to a series of at least 36 separate meetings and open houses with community, faculty and student groups to inform the public of preliminary plans and gather input, as well as front-page news stories, and say faculty members simply weren’t paying attention until it was too late.

Faculty members also worry that the expansion will disrupt the neighborhood for decades and increase the university’s costs, which could lead to higher tuition and debt for students and decrease the likelihood that faculty members will see raises in coming years.

While concern about NYU’s plans for expansion in Greenwich Village was the primary driver behind last week’s vote, many professors have also objected to the university’s rapid global expansion.

In addition to growing its network of study abroad sites, NYU has created full campuses in Abu Dhabi and now Shanghai, prompting concerns about academic freedom, a detraction of attention from academic programs in New York, and a lack of faculty input in the direction of the overseas sites. As Rebecca Karl, an associate professor of East Asian studies and history recently told Inside Higher Ed, "We’ve become very critical of the whole idea of ‘expand or die,’ which of course is a corporate maxim, but we don’t understand why it needs to become our maxim.”

Cyrus R. K. Patell, the associate dean of humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi and an associate professor of English, said it’s a mistake to lump NYU’s local expansion plans together with Sexton’s vision for a “Global Network University.” Patell voted against the no-confidence measure, which he described as “a very blunt instrument” that reduces a whole range of grievances against the Sexton administration into a single up-or-down vote.

“The creation of the GNU was a unique opportunity that came about because of a potential partnership between NYU and Abu Dhabi, and I think John [Sexton] seized on that as a once in an institution’s lifetime -- if not in educational history -- opportunity to do something really different,” he said.

By contrast, Patell described himself as ambivalent about NYU’s plans for expansion in Greenwich Village. “For me, I really am sorry that this 2031 plan has diverted institutional energy from the build-out of the GNU, because I do think that it’s a potentially revolutionary educational initiative” – revolutionary, he said, because it’s “built around the idea of constructive cross-cultural conversations being at the heart of education.”

Other tensions underlie the vote as well, particularly a 2006 decision not to recognize a former graduate student union in the wake of a decision by the National Labor Relations Board. In recent weeks the university has also faced criticism about a series of payments made to former employees, particularly recently appointed Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew.

Faculty members say these decisions reflect a view of the university held by administrators and the board that is fundamentally different than what they hold. They said the difference has to be reconciled before things move forward.

“This is not about John Sexton as an individual, it is about the nature of higher education in America,” said Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media, culture and communication in NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, who has been an outspoken critic of the Greenwich Village plan. “The fact is we see NYU as a school, we see our mission as educational. Sexton and the trustees who support him view NYU as a bundle of assets whole value they will apparently do anything to maximize on paper. We believe that this approach is destroying this university.”

A Question of Governance

The strain that runs through all the complaints about Sexton is that he is undermining the traditional model of faculty governance by cutting professors out of major decisions, an allegation that multiple research university presidents have faced in recent years.

Complicated issues like campuses abroad and online education present challenges to the traditional governance model. Under that model, financial matters might have been primarily handled by administrators while curricular matters would have been the province of the faculty. These days, some administrators view foreign expansion or a speedy move into new online programs as financial imperatives. But many professors see such initiatives as reshaping institutional mission and curriculum -- in other words, as matters on which they believe faculty leaders should play a key role.

That model was also predicated on smaller, less complex institutions where faculty members could reasonably be expected to keep up with various issues outside their discipline and form informed decisions.

“The notion of shared governance that has provided strength and stability and endurance in American higher education that worked so well when institutions were smaller and when faculty members were well-informed and engaged in decisions, maybe doesn’t translate quite as directly when institutions are at a much larger scale and when the pace of change is faster and such big ideas are on the table,” Broad said.

Faculty voices at research universities have traditionally been represented in governance discussions by elected representatives, who tend to be better-informed on specific issues than the faculty as a whole. Administrators feel like they're getting buy-in from the faculty as a whole when they work through such systems, but that is not always the case.

“One of the things that has been been happening in recent years is that research universities have become very, very prominent in our society as a whole,” said Hunter Rawlings, president of the Association of American Universities -- of which NYU is a member -- and former president of Cornell University and the University of Iowa. Rawlings cited developments like the growth in university research as a major economic driver; the expansion of campuses that make universities major landowners in municipalities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia; the growth in international engagement and development of campuses abroad; and the rapid development of online education in recent years that is reshaping the teaching function of research universities as evidence of this growing prominence.

“As institutions engage in more and more of these ventures, faculty members feel a sense that the university is developing in ways they don’t have too much say about,” Rawlings said. “In that context, the [NYU] vote is a bit like things we’re seeing at other universities, where faculty feel like the administration and board have gotten way ahead of the university with something, and they need to speak up in these instances. It’s a phenomenon we’ll probably see more of.”

University administrators are also under increased pressure to move quickly because of financial challenges facing the sector. For example, in less than a year more than 60 colleges and universities signed on to partner with Coursera. NYU faces even greater pressure on this front, higher education officials say, because its roughly $2.8 billion endowment is relatively modest given its size, academic profile and ambitions. And quick action is something traditional governance models, which emphasize deliberate decision-making, are ill-equipped to do.

NYU faculty members readily admit that their system of faculty governance has not always been robust. Faculty members, like many at research universities, are often more focused on their own research and what’s happening in their discipline than on institutional politics. But they see that shifting in the lead-up and in the wake of the vote. “I think that in some ways the conflict, if you like, is shifting from faculty versus president to faculty versus trustees,” Ross said. “It’s a welcome shift in a way because it means that the dealings of the trustees will be a little more apparent to people. At NYU, as at many other places, what the trustees do is completely hidden and secretive. What we’re hoping is this will draw out the trustees a little more and make them not only more human and visible but also more accountable.”

NYU now seems primed for a debate about how faculty voices will be represented in future discussions. Some faculty members, like Miller and Ross, say that such discussions will not be possible without significant administrative and board turnover. NYU faculty members said other schools – particularly the Steinhardt School and the Tisch School of the Arts -- are currently organizing their own votes of no confidence in Sexton that they hope will put even more pressure on the board to act.

The leadership of other branches of the university, including all the university's deans, current and former officers of the alumni association, and the School of Medicine's Faculty Senate, issued statements in support of Sexton before and after Friday's vote tally.

They are joined by others outside the institution, like Rawlings and Broad, who say Sexton will be able to steer the institution through the current debate to a better place, perhaps one that serves as a model for generating consensus in the future. "I am confident that going forward, this means that faculty voices will now be much more represented and more engaged as decisions are made," Broad said.